I'm looking for a charting library similar to amCharts that allows you to create graphs with a timeline, e.g:
http://www.amcharts.com/stock/
It should also allow to you to select a range within the chart and zoom in to see further specifics. The purpose of this is for visualizing performance related information such as i/o stats etc... Does anybody know of an open source library that will allow this? A Ruby (most preferable) or Python library would be ideal.
I don't know if that's going to be at all suitable for your needs, but recent "Communications of ACM" had an article about Protovis. The graphics is very impressive. Still on my todo list though.
Related
I am working on writing a GUI in Haskell (and Ur/Web, but that is another story), and have several development branches using different libraries and approaches that I am working on contemporaneously. In trying to migrate some of the code I had from browser-backed UI libraries with HTML elements (threepenny-gui, to be precise) to native GUI applets using a WX graphical backend (wxHaskell, reactive-banana), I encountered some trouble figuring out how to migrate some code I had that was based on constructing a <table> element to an equivalent wxWidgets construct. It seemed to me that there was no easy way to implement such a thing on my own, and no native equivalent. I am looking for implementation suggestions, pointers to extant implementations, suitable alternatives, and so forth. I can provide more in-depth specifics of the design I am looking for, should that be required.
The html table is merely used for aligning and displaying data, where one cell in every row is a reactive control, and the number of rows displayed at any given time can also vary reactively.
HTML table can contain just about anything in its cells so it's too rich to be represented by any native control. It's really hard to make a recommendation without knowing what exactly you have in the table, but the different possibilities are:
wxHtmlWindow: this can be used to reuse your HTML provided it's simple enough (HTML4 basically) and you can embed native controls into it if needed.
wxGrid: this is the most flexible widget, but it's not native.
wxDataViewCtrl: this is native control under GTK and OS X (but not MSW where you'd need to use wxListCtrl for 100% native approach) but it's pretty limited compared to either of the above solutions.
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I'm looking for an open-source pptx reader (preferred in C# ) to modify it and put it into a 3D engine ( customer request ), or at least a tutorial on the basics. I already searched on google but can't find any useful resources.
I know it's possible to create a new reader by reading the pptx files documentation ( ECMA ), but this seems to be a huge project anyway and I would prefer if I'm able to build this component on some existing code.
Your options
The best option to use really depends on the modifications you need to do. If you want to be able to heavily manipulate the PowerPoint presentation, draw new shapes, rotate shapes, add charts, add slides or master slides etc. you may find an abstraction layer like the Aspose.Slides library (proprietary) very useful.
If you do not want to pay for the library, the OpenXML formats are available to you in .NET. They allow you to manipulate every aspect of the PPTX document without the need for Interop/COM as they parse the XML inside the PPTX.
From personal experience, having used both, Aspose is a far easier solution but one that provides some overhead and of course has a cost. The OpenXML route is light to use, but requires some learning curve.
Last but not least, you can take a look at NetOffice which achieves something similar to Aspose, it is a little lighter and has reduced functionality. It also covers other formats and does not require Office installs on the machine.
To sum your options:
Aspose.Slides ($$)
OpenXML (curve, but flexibility)
NetOffice (limited functionality)
My advice
If you need to do some simple modifications (e.g. extract a slide, change a bit of text somewhere, replace an image) I would go with OpenXML.
If you want to draw slides in a bespoke manner, I would go with Aspose. I have used Aspose in a 50.000 LoC application to build hundreds of thousands of PowerPoint decks (up to a 100 slides at times) using WCF. Aspose has been drawing each slide and generating all the shapes. It takes about 4-5 seconds for a deck to be generated. The loading of Aspose and small issues with Aspose can be irritating (one can process a slide in around 200ms). Also Aspose presentations are not serializable, which is annoying if you want to cache the results in some form.
If you want to read the PPTX and somehow convert it to images, Aspose.Slides is a good candidate because it allows you to convert a PPTX slide to SVG which you can subsequently process. Note that there are some PPTX2SVG engines out there (XSLT) but the ones I know are written in Java (Apache).
Notes
The libraries I mentioned are all libraries for the .NET/C# environment. None of these libraries and techniques require office/interop/com installs.
Honestly, it is not an easy task. I tried to do this for a Presentation Designer and it there are not many solutions in the wild.
I used Office Open XML SDk 2.5. which is significantly better than crunching the XML by hand, but no picknick either.
If you have some money, you coukd use: http://www.aspose.com/.net/powerpoint-component.aspx
I don't know how good it is.
I know this is not good news, but Powerpoint recieves significantly less attention than Excel, so the resources a scarce.
You don't say if the application is going to have internet access, but assuming it is, you might think about using a public REST API to do the conversion of the PPTX into whatever format you need. There may be more, but here are a some that provide this functionality:
Aspose for Cloud Powerpoint API
Doxument
ConvertAPI
Some have free tier where you can do a certain amount of conversions per day without paying a usage fee. Aspose for Cloud has a .Net SDK, but with a REST API the language of the client shouldn't really matter.
As has been pointed out, there is no clean and simple solution for this. In my opinion you are limited to 2 choices:
Use Microsoft's own / VSTO. Also info here. This is likely to give you a lot of headaches, but may be the only thing that gives you access to the PowerPoint features you require.
Use Open XML. This has already been covered. In likelihood this will be easier to use, but may not provide access to the features you require.
Beyond that I'm afraid you'll have to create something a lot more 'manual'.
I try to figure out a way of controlling a browser (preferably Firefox) via R scripts in order to retrieve information controlled by AJAX/Javascripts in Websites. For example, how could I retrieve the values in field "Modell" at http://www.mobile.de/home/index.html?
AFAIU, Gabe Becker's package "RFirefox" does provide some sort of link between R an Firefox. But being a Windows-Kid (not by conviction, but longstanding network effects ;-)), I couldn't try it myself yet so I'm not sure if it can do what I'm after.
So: is there anyone out there who does have some experience with either RFirefox or handling AJAX via R yet? Don't want you to do my homework, but before I plunge into the Linux world I'd just like to assess if it's worth it.
Nevertheless, any code examples would be greatly appreciated. ;-)
I'm not clear on why you need a browser to do this. It's just web scraping; it will require some kind of parser, certainly, but not necessarily a browser. I think that RFirefox may be barking up the wrong tree. If you want to play with Javascript+R connections, take a look at Duncan Temple Lang's SpiderMonkey.
Even so, I think it may be better to collect data with a more serious crawling/scraping facility suited for working with Javascript. This question on SO seems particularly aligned with that. My recommendation would be to get a tool that does what you need, and then interface that with R at the simplest level possible. There are bindings for Webkit to several languages, albeit this doesn't seem to be the case for R.
This question addresses your situation even more closely: it is also on Windows. It doesn't use Webkit. The three suggestions in the accepted answer refer to accessing the tools, written in C/C++, from Python. R has interfaces for both, so you may find it easier to write some stuff to work with these and pass objects and instructions back and forth between R and Python or C/C++.
I spend most of my time plotting data, but unfortunately I haven't found a decent solution for my plotting needs. At the moment, the most powerful and pleasant library I found that performs plotting is matplotlib. The results are stunning, but I mostly spend my time fighting with the library when trying to do simple things like having an arrow as I want. SImilar programs like R and gnuplot produce visually less appealing results, and they are not GUI based.
On the other hand, programs like xmgrace (or better) allow direct manipulation of the plotted objects and direct feedback, but they fail on two important points:
if my dataset (normally stored in csv files) changes for some reason, I have to reimport it and perform the manipulations again, by hand
once I obtain a nice plot setup, the only way I have to recreate the plot is to use a graphical, interactive program. I would like to have the possibility to run a command line utility on my csv files and get the .pdf as a result, with no human intervention.
I still have to find something that provides me both worlds, and it has an affordable price. Ideally, I would need an interactive GUI program (a la Origin) to generate matplotlib-based python scripts.
Does anyone have any hints on software that could address my needs on OSX (preferably) or Linux ?
You may want to check out Igor Pro. It's quite old, and quirky but it provides the most advanced plotting system I've found yet on the Mac. You can modify anything graphically, at a command line or in script files. The most powerful feature (IMO) is the ability to automatically generate a script to recreate a figure or to use a figure to create a script that generates figures like (in style etc.) a particular figure. I use Igor for all publication figures I produce.
Data is stored in "waves" (translation: vectors) which encapsulate data and information about the delta between data points (e.g. time step). Figures reference waves as their data source. When you update a wave (e.g. by re-importing a CSV file and specifying that the data overwrite specific waves), all figures that reference that wave are automatically updated.
You can create "layouts" which are page-layouts containing multiple graphs. These layouts are also automatically updated whenever any of the figures in the layout are updated (see above). You can add drawing/text/annotations to either graphs or layout.s
Be warned: Igor Pro's scripting language is something like the bastard child of VB and Matlab. It makes my eyes bleed. It makes me pray to whatever God that the pain just end. But the entire system is so powerful that it's worth it.
I have always used Matlab or R for this sort of thing. While you may not like how the generic plots look, I find that once I familiarize myself with the libraries I can make them as fancy as I want them to be.
R being free, I would try to stick it out with that. It is extremely powerful and perfectly suited to what you need (generate charts on the fly directly from datafiles). I bet that the more you get comfortable with it, you'll find yourself using R for a wide range of tasks outside of plotting data.
MathGL is cross-platform GPL library which meet all yours criteria. It can produce nice graphics, it can read csv files, it have window for displaying graphics (you don't need to know widget libraries), and it can plot in console (don't need a window or X at all). At this you can use C/C++/Fortran/Python/... for yours own code or MGL scripts for simplicity (see UDAV front-end in the last case).
Finally it can produce bitmaps (PNG/JPEG/GIF/...) or vector (EPS/SVG) output. Later it can be converted to PDF easily. Or you can create a PDF with U3D directly -- you'll need HPDF and U3D libraries in this case.
I'm in the process of developling various applications for whom the end users are both engineers and salesman. Some of the operations and options may not be immediately obvious to all users. All applications are delivered with a PDF and paper manual - but of course nobody reads them!
I would like to improve the usability of the applications by including dynamic context sensitive help. One option would be alá MSDN and have F1 call up a web page - however internet access will not always be available and even this will be too much effort for some.
Another idea is to have descriptions pop up when an option is hovered over - like a tooltip.
I'm interested in other peoples views on this and what are best practices in this situation. Along a similar theme to this post What are common UI misconceptions and annoyances? I'd like to start a discussion regarding these two points:
What would be the best way to go about it?
What help features in existing applications you use either delight or annoy you..?
In my experience nobody but programmers reads the help. So when you have a technical and non-technical target audience you end up providing 2 ways of doing everything:
A Wizard with a few options.
A property editor with lots of options.
In either case, pictures are usually better than words for documentation. So a screenshot or 3 with big green arrows and circles calling out what does what will go a lot further than an indexing, exhaustive help file.
In my experience it would be very helpful to have a tooltip on each option that provides a little more definition/clarity for each option. Additionally, you can improve usability by having the default screen contain a few common, simple options and providing an advanced section that provides more control.
I'm currently working on a similar side-project. We have an existing product that's used by people as part of their day job. There is an inherent learning curve on the product, so users receive some degree of training and have people they can turn to for assistance. Even so, we know it needs more help and user documentation in general.
We are starting this help enhancement project by running a quick survey on the end users, (offering a prize draw as an incentive). We will also speak to the support staff who have to deal with help requests. This will uncover some of the pain points, and will give us a clear idea of how to focus our time & resources.
Guidelines on when to use inline tips vs tool tips etc can be found in various style guides, e.g. here:
http://developers.sun.com/docs/web-app-guidelines/uispec4_0/11-help.htm
Bear in mind that it's probably a bad idea to just copy & paste the text from your existing manuals into contextual help tips. You're going to need help writing completely new content. See if you can get some time from a technical writer / copywriter.